The homeless man's words made Joey feel a hint of evil. The street, which originally had only a few people, seemed even more weird in the silent night.
There are countless pairs of eyes staring here, hiding themselves with the help of darkness.
"If you die of your wife, you will make a big fortune. If you die of your son, if you make a big fortune, they will all die. They will all die."
The homeless man grinned, his eyes lost focus for a moment, and he became stupid. He was talking in a daze, without the logic of a normal person. His body was swaying, and before Joey could react, he ran into the alley. ,Disappear.
It wasn't until the tramp's figure disappeared into the darkness that the feeling of being watched by countless pairs of eyes weakened.
"If one person is full, the whole family will not be hungry and be happy~"
The sound seemed to be kept at a constant distance, weak, but clearly enough for Joey to hear.
"Um?"
The gloom in Joey's eyes flashed: "Are you asking me to follow you?"
He raised his head slightly and looked in the direction where the homeless man disappeared, as if he wanted to see through the dark curtain.
After hesitating for a moment, he finally decided to follow.
As I walked, I gradually realized something was wrong. After going around in a circle, I followed the sound and actually returned to the Black Church.
Beside the bushes and weeds, the homeless man was sitting on the ground with a piece of grass in his mouth, as if he was waiting for Joey.
Joey walked over directly, looked at it carefully for about ten seconds, and then said:
"It wasn't safe there just now, was it?"
"Bah." He spat out the weeds in his mouth and looked at Joey with a joking look on his face: "It doesn't count. The most I can do is arrest you and burn you to death."
"Isn't this dangerous? Damn old man, won't your conscience hurt when you say this?"
"How much is that thing worth if you cut it off?" He stared at Joey with a half-smile: "Boy, if you show your conscience here, you will die miserably."
Joey didn't want to get entangled in these issues. Now he was concerned about everything about this church, so he asked directly:
"You brought me here, let's be honest, for what purpose?"
"Before that, would you like to answer some questions for me?"
"Exchange of equal value, that's fair, I agree." Joey nodded.
"First, where are you from and what year is it now?"
"Second, did you break in by mistake or did you come in by yourself?"
"Third...you answer the first two first"
He was clearly organized and articulate, which was so different from the way he pretended to be crazy and stupid before, that it even made Joey wonder if this guy had schizophrenia.
I thought the other party would ask something very important, but I didn't expect it to be an irrelevant question.
"It is now 1385, and I was born in Port Leia. As for the second question?" When he said this, he paused deliberately and looked at the person opposite with a look that you knew.
"The second question will allow me to decide whether to waste my time on you or not." His tone was full of impatience.
While the other party was trying to figure him out, he was also testing the bottom line.
"I came in voluntarily... Of course, if I had a choice, I would not take this step. One of my relatives is missing. Here are the latest clues found."
Joey's words seemed to give him great courage, and his expression became very excited, and he even wanted to come forward and give him a hug.
"Go away~"
"Hey, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm excited, I'm excited"
"You can call me Yunus. You are the investigator of the temple, right?" He spoke with a look of earnestness on his face.
It turns out that the reason for asking me whether to enter actively or passively is here. Joey raised his eyebrows slightly and nodded slightly, but did not deny it.
At this time, even a fool can see that the identity of the Holy Church is easier to use.
If you say this to an unemployed college student who has just graduated, it will not be convincing at all.
"Have people started to go missing? Those crazy guys are here again."
them? Joey keenly caught the word in the words and whispered: Who are they?
The strange thing is that when Joey asked about 'them', a look of fear appeared on Yunus' originally calm face.
The words came out dry and hoarse:
"Those were the rats hiding in the sewers, a group of crazy pagans who summoned a terrible being."
"Impossible. If there is an evil god coming, why is there no record?"
Evil God is a collective term. It refers to gods that are not recognized by the Church of the Seven Gods, and they are all given the name of 'evil'.
The intensity of combating heretics has always been listed as the highest alert, but the fact is that in Leah, there is no official history, not even urban legends.
Yunus seemed to have noticed Joey's doubts, shook his head and smiled bitterly: "Just now, what year did you say it is... 1385, right... Do you know what year the time here is? 1375, too. That was ten years ago”
"Moreover, the people involved in the disaster ten years ago were either dead, expelled, or like me, trapped here."
Um? If the church hid these incidents, it would be easy to understand, but there is one thing that is illogical. Joey frowned, looked directly at Yunus with sharp eyes and said:
"Do you mean to be trapped here for ten years, or without food?"
It was Yunus who said that the food here was inedible. Living in this situation for ten years has a big problem in itself.
Thinking of this, Joey took a few steps back as he spoke. As long as something went wrong, he would run away without looking back.
Yunus raised his eyes and looked around. In the dark night, there were only a few weak gas lamps stubbornly staying up late. The silver-white moonlight shone on the bluestone tiles of the street, reflecting the outline of the roof ridges.
He took two steps forward and there was the black church fence.
"In the past ten years, you are not the only one who has been here. To be more precise, when day and night alternate every day, this place will be connected to the real world outside."
"Of course, this time is very short, only a few minutes. During that time, it will leave this space and overlap with reality. The source of food also comes from that time."
Joey was stunned for a moment and muttered to himself: No wonder they were looking through the trash can. Maybe someone had thrown something away during that time.
It only takes a few minutes, and it is indeed difficult to detect changes in the surrounding environment without one being aware of it.
Although this place doesn't look big, there are still many people there. Can these people survive for ten years by overlapping reality for a few minutes?
Joey didn't believe this.
"Actually, to be honest, we people have been prepared to die for a long time. If we can really die, maybe it will be a kind of relief?"
"What do you mean?" Joey looked at Yunus, vaguely feeling that something was wrong with his words.
Yunus dusted himself off. His unkempt hair covered most of his face. The sunken cheeks on both sides and the yellowed skin all showed his hardship.
"Have you seen those people too? How do you feel?"
Joey touched his chin and thought back to the people he met before. Each one of them had expressionless faces and behaved completely unlike normal people.
He frowned and said: "Puppet on a string..."
"This metaphor is very appropriate." Yunus smiled bitterly and shook his head. "To be precise, they are all dead people with no thoughts, only an implanted memory, and they repeat the same thing day after day."
Joey pursed his lips and chose silence.
All events related to the extraordinary cannot be thought of from an ordinary person's perspective.
Being implanted with memories, in some ways, is very similar to Ruger Giles trying to take Joey's body.
The only difference may be that the person occupying the body may not be a 'person'
If I remember correctly, except for Yunus, everyone else exists in that state. . .
Thinking, thinking, Joey felt a chill rising from his back and quickly spreading throughout his body.
In ten years, if I had been in this situation, living with a group of puppets, I would have gone crazy.
Joey turned his head, glanced across Yunus, and sighed from the bottom of his heart: Maybe his madness was not entirely a pretense.
Yunus looked at Joey's face and made a 'tsk' sound in his mouth. Perhaps he guessed what he was thinking and was not annoyed. He just said in a depressed voice:
"I don't want to be like them. I have to go back. My family is waiting for me and my elder brother is waiting for me."
Joey coughed lightly, "Given your age, I'm sure your family is still alive."
The white hair on his head, the waist that cannot be straightened, and the wrinkles on his face, all the details prove that this is an old man. At his age, his parents cannot be still alive.
"No." Yunus looked excited, holding his head with both hands and pulling his hair. He seemed to have entered a state of madness again: "I can feel that my brother is calling me, he is outside."
Joey shook his head helplessly and sighed: Maybe the calling voice was someone who told him directly that he would not have a mental breakdown.
After thinking about it, he decided to use a more tactful tone and said: "Do you know how to get out?"
Yunus smiled stupidly with a strange look on his face: "If I could go out, I would have gone out long ago."
Joey frowned, secretly cursing himself an idiot, and then said:
"Then there must be some clues."
"What the hell, it was the priest of your church who buried this church in this space."
"Huh?" Joey was slightly surprised: "The church doesn't care about you people?"
Yunus said: "A hundred people die, or ten thousand people die, which side would you choose?"
"Of course..." Joey said smoothly and almost blurted out that there were more people.
"Look!" Yunus smiled bitterly and shook his head, "They will all choose to sacrifice a small number of people."
Joey was silent and thought for a moment: "Never place your hopes on others. Instead of betting that the person in power will find out, it's better to save yourself."
This truth, on the first day he came to this world, he proved it at a bloody price.
"Were those people in this state from the beginning?" Joey was referring to the puppets who had no consciousness of their own.
Yunus shook his head and said: "No, in fact, in the beginning, although there was no freedom, everyone was still quite harmonious. There was always a glimmer of hope that someone would come to rescue."
"As time goes by, some people's mental state has problems, and it is like a plague, infecting everyone in a very short period of time."
At this point, Yunus's eyes became dark and his voice was low and hoarse: "My friends, neighbors, men, and women, like platycodon in autumn, fell in large pieces."
Joey frowned and shook his head: "No, there are too few people."
Recalling the few passers-by I saw on the street before, according to Yunus, there are definitely many people trapped here.
This sentence seemed to strike a chord, and Yunus suddenly shouted hysterically:
"Eat...all was eaten..."
Hiss~
Joey gasped suddenly.
This is crazy, cannibalism.
This kind of thing is unimaginable even in Senegal.
Looking at Yunus who was tending to go crazy, Joey sighed silently in his heart and lamented: In the land abandoned by the gods, there is no sun, the conditions are difficult, and without the prying eyes of the evil god, this can be regarded as a different kind of protection!
Along the way, Levitt Street within the scope of the Black Church is not small in scale.
It was visually estimated that it could accommodate a thousand people, but now only these sesame seeds and mung beans were left. Joey felt his stomach churn when he thought about how most of the population had been eaten in the past ten years.
Even if he survived, he would still look like that now.
At this moment, in Joey's mind, the glorious image of the church weakened a bit.
Brush it~
Suddenly, a sound of metal collision sounded in the quiet night sky.
Joey's attention was drawn to it subconsciously.
The originally locked church door slowly opened.
The copper lock on top fell to the ground.
The open passage is like a delicate flower blooming, waiting for the destined person to come and pick it.
"The time... has arrived." Yunus's body was trembling, and he kept making a cross on his chest.
"What the hell?" The locked door suddenly opened. Before I could figure out the situation, Yunus' move was really scary.
"Can I go in?" Joey opened his mouth and asked tentatively, staring at Yunus' face, trying to capture more information from his face.
Yunus's eyes were blank, and he looked blankly at the huge cross on the top of the church roof. The gem in the middle of the cross was emitting a long blue light.
The crescent moon hanging in the sky turned into a full moon at some point, covered with a thin layer of silver luster.
"The moon, the moon is out"
Yunus knelt down and worshiped. He raised his head, closed his eyes tightly, and greedily accepted the baptism of the moonlight.
"Huh?" Let's play vampires for a while? Still a werewolf, I won't be tempted to transform into a wolf later.
Joey's eyes sparkled with excitement and he asked excitedly:
"Damn old man, stop kneeling, tell me quickly, what is going on?"
He calculated in his mind that the time now should be 12 o'clock in the morning, the time of day when the yin energy is at its strongest.
Things were getting more and more confusing, and now his mind was almost exploding.
"Quick, you can go in now." Yunus stood up suddenly, pulled Joey and ran into the church.
"Hey, hey, don't worry." In fact, he was very reluctant to do such a reckless thing.
As a lucky master, he took out a steel coin from his arms, flicked it into the air, and then landed on the back of his hand.
I thought silently: "Luck will be by my side tonight"
Gently spread it out and turned it over. At this moment, he paused, scratched his head, shrugged and said, "How about another day?"
